Textures and patterns

There's a great resource of textures and patterns here on the website flickr.

afrgraphics is a member of the "pool" which means we are able to upload our own samples, but it also allows us access to use a number of the images there. Be careful though as some of the images are still under copyright, while others require a credit.

There's plenty of freebies around too, like this one.

Login is afrgraphics, and the password is the same as the one for this site..... (Les)

CBA debacle

This first attempt at an interactive timeline was pretty lame in the end.... Based around the Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae dramas last September, it was too big for the average small screen. All the info was there, and while it had a few photos and graphs included, it was very static.



This next one was a better size for screens, remade from the original printed graphic......

This is how it appeared in the AFR....


and here it is online....

Rudd front page - Feb 4

Earlier this month the Rudd government launched the idea of a $42 billion stimulus package to boost the local economy in the current world financial crisis. News of the stimulus package hit the desks on the same day that the RBA had met and decided to drop official interest rates by 100 basis points..... this all added up to big news on the Australian financial front, which in turn called for a front page graphic.

There was plenty of early discussion about the number of graphs, pointers and photos to appear in the graphic. Drew was heavily involved in deciding what went in and what was left out. A difficult task given so much detail was required. Great job in the end Drew!

Further discussions are being held among some of the senior artists to decide how best to attack future front page graphics like this one.... (Les)

Illustrator small CAPS

There's another way you can change text to ALL CAPS in Illustrator CS3. You can still use the usual "Type" menu at the top, but there's also a little menu on the Text tool box which also does the ALL CAPS thing!

There's also a few other bits & pieces in there for the typographers out there, the most useful for us I reckon, being the SMALL CAPS option...... (Les)

The year that was....

To finish the year off, the AFR ran a couple of big graphics showing how bad the ASX faired during 2008 (the worst year on record apparently)..... the biggest graphic was a full double page spread produced by Ev and based around an open diary. It was a great looking job and took a fair amount of tinkering to get all the relevant details in.... The new handwriting font Ev used was a nice touch too - it helped make the diary notes and the two little side graphs look like they were hand drawn...... Awesome job!



The other major graphic was a timeline of key events through the year, again over two pages...... It used a nice set of colours and a collage of pics under the line, combined with a large amount of text above the line...... plenty of info in a much smaller space, but another great graphic.



As a side note I guess, this one looks like it may have caused a few cyber issues being sent through as 2 seperate images as opposed to a single true spread image.... not really evident unless you're looking for it though.... (Les)

End of the month special

Did you see this little beauty? The graphics package at the end of "Black November" featured a massive 14 elements - 11 charts and 3 tables!! Quite a job to get everything in and readable eh? Nice work!! Let's hope its not something we'll have to do EVERY month!! (Les)

Obama front pages

I guess it's all said on the Font Feed blog that "Historic moments call for historic front pages and historic headlines".

Last month (November 2008) when the US elected a new President it was big news worldwide. Barack Obama beat John McCain to become America's 44th President, the first African American President is US history. All over the internet, websites started displaying, comparing and commentating on newspaper front pages from all over the world. The biggest collection of "US election" front pages was at the Newseum site with over 700 examples from 60-odd countries... (all with downloadable PDFs also).... if you look long enough you'll even find the AFR one - though, because of the time difference between Australia and the US, the AFR US election edition is actually on the "next day's" page!!

Below are the AFR's and SMH's front pages.... Neither paper varied too much from their "usual" edition styles which was a little disappointing. Given it was arguablly the biggest news story in recent time, more could've been done to make the editions leap off the stands like The Daily Telegraph and Syndey's MX newspaper's did.



Below I've added a few more of interest (no I didn't look at all 700 of them!!).... some used a single image and large header to dominate the whole front page, and others used different approaches with graphics and multiple images. I thought the two newspapers below that used smaller black & white images of the past 43 US presidents were interesting. The Staten Island Advance in particular was the boldest use of images I saw.

I've included a cover from Spain here also which features a US-flag style graphic which is something along the lines of what Dot had been suggesting we investigate at the Fin. The graphic end up dominating the whole cover and looked OK. It was interesting to see how it was done too because at the time I hadn't been able to envisage exactly what Dot was suggesting.





Go and have a look at the Newseum site..... there's plenty of front pages there every day.... some with graphics too... (Les)